Dystopia, narcissism, and control mythologies

I5

Dystopia is a control mythology, that's what it is, and it is the mark of a society that is completely narcissistic that imagines that its own ending is equivalent to the ending of the world... Will we face resource shortage? Unquestionably. Will there be difficult choices to be made? Absolutely. Will there be fascism? Yes, almost certainly. Do we maybe need some of that crisis in order to actually generate movement forward? Unfortunately, probably yes.

Forces of demobilization

I25

There are significant reasons why it could get harder to socially organize in the future. For one we could get a more socially progressive federal government and that would blow some of the steam out of the long-term strategies that social movements need because people would be like, ‘oh we did it!’ Kind of like what happened in the US...when Obama got elected. And also it could go the other way and there could just be a criminalization of dissent...but I think, for the most part, people of my generation realize that they've been dealt a shitty hand and are probably reluctant to do that to the next generation unless they can really convince themselves that everything is okay. But I think that every generation that comes is getting harder and harder to convince that everything is okay.

Sectarianism, violence, and authority

I24

When I was involved in the sectarian left in the sixties and seventies the vision then was that we were going to take over control of the state and run society…[in order to] creat[e] equality and all of that sort of thing. There was never any clear understanding of how that was going to happen and the propaganda among those sectarian groups of one kind or another was always that in the Soviet Union everybody's got a place to live, and everybody's got a job, and they’ve got health care, and nobody ever looked at the fact that people were being shot everyday for virtually nothing. I think that most of these sectarian groups were characterized by the Stalin-type leader who was the ultimate authority.

Building commonality

I1

I [found] myself spending more and more of my time on issues I was seeing [around me]....I saw tenant organizing in a similar way that I see union organizing: it's a way to actually build commonality.

Other ways of knowing and doing

I30

We [First Nations communities] were the original communists without the authoritarianism, really, truly. There's ways we have of dealing with stuff that I think is directly applicable to all the stuff we're talking about. The idea of a council, of people doing things as a collective where they have to come to a consensus and come to agreement….the community decides and that's the difference between a collective model and a hierarchical, pyramidal way of doing things. It's done in a circle not a pyramid.

Memories of struggle

I1

Here in Nova Scotia we're losing all kinds of memory of our own history everyday as people pass away. In the late ‘80s, as an undergrad student, I had a project [in] a labour history course I was taking….I went up to Cape Breton and interviewed folks in their kitchens around what was happening with the mine workers’ strikes in the ‘20s and ‘30s. The best folks died and I don't think I realized at the time how useful that stuff was. We don't have that even going on today and we're losing…[our collective] memory….we don't have a tremendous amount of intergenerational memory on what [struggles were] about, what [they were] fighting for, what the underlying basis [for them was.]

Values in action

I7

We're not as good at making our messages attractive….People like to talk about their values and people make their political decisions, whether it's voting or...what they're engaged in, what they choose to support, and they do that based on values. They don't do that based on solid analysis for the most part….we've come to a point in human history, I guess, in our civilization, where it's not about solidly analyzing everything unless it has to do with you personally, unless it's like your RRSPs, then you do it, but in terms of your politics people vote their values.

Building to revolution

I30

The point is to keep doing something until...there comes a point where everything shifts….all the things that people understand [come through struggle], not by some theoretical discussion, [but] by creating an action based on what it is people want and when you do that action, the action itself leads to awareness….Little by little, incrementally, those things shift and quite frankly that's what a revolution is. It's kind of like boiling water, you put the pot on and at one point it's 210, and then at 211 it gets real hot, and then at 212 it turns into steam, something totally different, that's a revolution.

No return

I22

I think the world is pregnant with dangers, to use an unfortunate metaphor, it's pregnant, it's full. War,...[w]e haven't even spoken about...the environmental crisis. People operate in sort of a linear epistemology and what we see with the environmental crisis, it's exponential. So in our lifetimes, ten, fifteen years down the road, it's not short, we could see even greater calamities because who knows how these complex systems interact? So there's all of these issues and so to solve all of these people need to realize that none of these can be solved by believing that...we can go back to the past and that these people [in power] can be pressured into going back into the past because history doesn't work that way.

Outrage, movements, and institutionalization

I17

Protests, they get a lot of attention, but unless you have millions of people it's not going to amount to anything and one of the things governments have learned is that volunteers wear out eventually. You can't sustain a white-hot movement indefinitely without becoming an institution. So as soon as that happens you've lost the white-hot outrage that got you started….In order to have the kind of impact [you] want, [you] have to become something different then [you]...started out to be.